Commentaries on Directions That Will Impact the Future of Technology

Archive for the tag “DVD”

A couple of weeks ago, my stepson, the techy genius, asked me if I was tuned in to Ultraviolet. He was surprised to learn that I’d never heard of it. I am talking here about the service designed to peddle movies and such, not part of the light spectrum beyond visible violet. For those of you who never heard of it either, here is a quick synopsis:

In the cloud, there is a place to store movies and other forms of video entertainment. One buys the movies from any one of dozens of purveyors. Instead of walking out of a store with a DVD in your hand, the movie gets uploaded to the cloud (or maybe it is already there). By entering a password, you can access your movie in several ways: You can stream it to any device equipped for streaming video. You can download it to a computer for later viewing. You can make a DVD, although you are only allowed to make a single copy. Ultraviolet identifies itself as “a digital rights authentication and cloud-based licensing system.”

The entertainment industry loves the idea because it thinks it might limit piracy (talk about heads in the sand). Retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online, like the idea. They get the same price they would for a physical DVD, but they don’t have to carry any inventory. When you go to the Ultraviolet website, you will find a long list of some of the biggest names in video entertainment and the places that sell it identified as sponsors or supporters.

Despite the hype and the big-name support, both the reviewers and the public in general have not said many nice things about the service. The Gigaom and Techdirt reviews are typical. The system is cumbersome to use for average folks, and it does not have the support of the 800-pound gorillas, Amazon and Apple.

Although Ultraviolet was announced in July 2010, it hasn’t made much progress. Only Sony and Paramount have offered their films via Ultraviolet, and those offerings are limited to a small fraction of the movies in their portfolios. So, despite the hype, the content providers are not exactly demonstrating a heavy commitment. Without content, the system is doomed.

It is no secret that DVD and Blu-ray sales are decreasing. How many people need to buy movies, when it is so much cheaper to rent them on Netflix or at kiosks? Another competitive threat is coming from the cable and satellite TV companies. Not only can you DVR movies for later viewing, but they are offering subscribers the ability to stream them at no extra cost. Unlike Netflix, which is pleading for the authority to stream movie content, the cable guys already have it. Then there are the illegal downloads that can be found easily by simply doing a Google search.

As I said above, I’d never even heard of Ultraviolet until now, and I am supposed to know about important technologies in the home entertainment business. I do not see a market-driving force that suggests that Ultraviolet, or any service requiring upfront money for movie content, has a chance of succeeding. Do you? Requiem Blockbuster.

Last night, my wife and I began to watch a rental movie on DVD. The opening screen said (I’m paraphrasing) “This DVD contains only the movie. If you want the best picture and sound plus many bonus features, you should buy this movie on Blu-ray.”

Audio

I checked and found out that the audio on the Blu-ray disk is 5.1 surround, the same audio provided on the DVD. It is true that Blu-ray can provide “lossless” 6.1 or 7.1 surround sound which adds an additional back channel like you might encounter in a movie theater. However, a competing 6.1/7.1 technology, Dolby Digital EX or THX EX can also provide 6.1 or 7.1 sound on DVDs. Maybe if you have 15-year old ears you can hear the difference, but most people won’t notice. In either case the argument is virtually moot, since the number of movie disks that have either Blu-ray or EX 6.1/7.1 sound is miniscule and the numbre of people set up for 6.1/7.1 sound reproduction is even smaller. Strike 1 for Blu-ray.

Picture Quality

Now let’s examine the issue of picture quality. Most TV sets sold in the past 5 years are capable of handling HD (High Definition) images with up to 1080p resolution. That means 1080 scan lines, non-interlaced (“p” stands for “progressive”, which means exactly the same thing as non-interlaced). Blu-ray provides 1080p natively, while DVDs offer only 480p resolution. Thus it would seem that Blu-ray has a huge advantage in picture quality. While Blu-ray images are superior, they are not that superior, because the clever folks who design DVD players have provide a feature called “video upscaling” that takes a 480p signal and converts it to a 1080p signal! It used to be that this technology cost $20,000, but today it is reduced to a chip that costs less than $5. Therefore, if your DVD player has upscaling (and almost all of them built in the past five years do), your picture will be almost as good as Blu-ray. Strike 2 for Blu-ray. In fact, 90% of people over the age of 50 can’t tell the difference.

Bonus Features

So far, I’ve shown that Blu-ray’s advantages in picture and sound quality are there, but meaningless to the average TV viewer. That leaves bonus features as the last significant DVD/Blu-ray differentiator. As it turns out, very few Blu-ray disks have whiz-bang bonus features. Why? It turns out that the great majority of Viewers have very little interest in bonus features. Not only that, whiz-bang bonus features are expensive to produce, and, as a result, are not common. Strike 3 for Blu-ray.

Streaming Video Competition

Finally, we have the issue of streaming Internet video which virtually every pundit has declared is the future of TV or at least will be a major part of it. It will be a long time, if ever, that streaming video will be able to accommodate Blu-ray. There simply isn’t enough network bandwidth. This is especially true in the US, which is practically a third-world country when it comes to providing its citizens with broadband Internet service. In any event, streaming video is not Blu-ray’s friend.

Not Going Away Soon

I don’t mean to say that Blu-Ray is dead. Disney, for example which has the highest ratio of disk to box office sales in the industry, says it will continue to push Blu-ray until it no longer is no longer a viable medium for movies. I also want to emphasize that this discussion is limited to movies. As a data medium, Blu-ray has a lot to offer – unparalleled storage density in a portable format, for example. If you have a lot of data, a Blu-ray disk player/recorder is just the thing for your PC or Mac. Blu-ray is also an important technological piece of the gaming market.

Cost Differential

Back to the movie I saw last night (“Dolphin Tale“, excellent family movie by the way). Amazon sells the DVD version for $15 and the Blu-ray version for $24, a 60% premium. I think that price differential is very difficult for Joe Couch Potato to justify. Don’t you?

References

If you are interested in learning more about TV audio and video, I recommend the following websites:

For an excellent layman’s description of the various audio options,go to the Crutchfield website.